Blender continues to advance and now out with version 2.62, the open-source and free 3D software suite adds some great new features in recent “point” additions. Let’s recap some highlights.

In this release Boolean operations have been advanced with new “Carve” Booleans. The boolean modifier now uses the “Carve Library“, which is a C++ library that is developed and tested in parallel on Windows, Mac and Linux. As a result complex modeling operations in Blender 2.62 are much faster and with improved results. While this is a new library for booleans for Blender the general workflow and options for boolean modeling remains unchanged.

01 - New Blender 2.62 update. (image courtesy Blender.org)

There is also new updated UV tools in 2.62. There is now an advanced interactive stitch tool, to align and join together UV islands. There is seam marking in the UV editor and a subdivision surface aware UV unwrapping to reduce stretching problems.

02 - New Carve Boolean library added to Blender 2.62.

Recent important updates include the Cycles Render engine with support for render layers and passes, multi-GPU support and much more. To see all the updates to Blender in version 2.62 go here.

Blender is available for free on Windows, Mac and Linux, including PowerPC based Macs. Go here now.